Monday, December 8, 2025

Two Coats of Arms on an Historic Storefront


You can find two different coats of arms on the small-front building at 216 Strand in London, England.

One, the most impressive one, naturally, is the Royal Arms of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, displayed on the front of the building to denote that the proprietors have a Royal Warrant from Her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. (It may, or may not, have been upated since the accession of King Charles III to the throne.)

Be that as it may, this is what I saw when I passed by just a few years ago:


But as I said, there is another coat of arms there, less well-known, perhaps, but just as important to the proprietors:


These are, obviously, the arms of Twinings Tea & Coffee Merchants. The arms are differenced form of the personal arms of the Twining family (by reversing the tinctures and adding the lion), and are blazoned: Sable a fess embattled between two mullets and a lion passant guardant Argent. The crest is: A cubit arm grasping two snakes each entwined around the arm all proper. (So the crest is actually a cant, a stretched one, but still, a cant, or pun, on the surname.) The motto is: Fortiter ac Firmiter (Strongly and Firmly).

You can learn a little more about Twinings, its Royal Warrant, and its "logo", which is claimed to be the oldest one in the world, on-line at https://pagenorth.co.uk/the-worlds-oldest-logo/

It's always a little bit awe-inspiring to me, that you can learn so much by digging into the history of a place that you may have stopped at for only a minute or two, for the purpose of taking a couple of photographs.

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